All out of doors looked darkly in at himThrough the thin frost, almost in separate stars,That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.What kept his eyes from giving back the gazeWas the lamp tilted near them in his hand.What kept him from remembering what it wasThat brought him to that creaking room was age.He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.And having scared the cellar under himIn clomping there, he scared it once againIn clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roarOf trees and crack of branches, common things,But nothing so like beating on a box.A light he was to no one but himselfWhere now he sat, concerned with he knew what,A quiet light, and then not even that.He consigned to the moon, such as she was,So late-arising, to the broken moonAs better than the sun in any caseFor such a charge, his snow upon the roof,His icicles along the wall to keep;And slept. The log that shifted with a joltOnce in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,A farm, a countryside, or if he can,It's thus he does it of a winter night.

Her defenders might say that's ridiculous, voters wouldn't have been swayed by such a cheap and empty trick, because everybody knows that sooner or later Amanda's going to have one too many Lone Stars, get cranked up by one of the great new bands she sees play every weekend, and the combination of beer and high spirits will move her to put the goods on display in a spontaneous moment of generosity so why bother wasting your vote to get a peek at what we're all going to get a peek at anyway?

She won fair and square, and deservedly, they'd say. Read her blog and you'll see. But still, the more honest of them would admit, she did promise nevertheless and, even if it didn't influence the voting, it's time to pay up. Roxanne, for one, is pretty insistent.

Hold on, hold on, says Amanda herself. She didn't promise to expose her breasts. She promised to show us some boobies. It's not her fault if we're all so lecherous that the word has only one association for us. She made a promise, and she's now kept her promise, so tough ti---um, nevermind.

Now, as much as I think the blog world could be enhanced by some more cheesecake---I'd add it could use some beefcake, but the idea of male bloggers posing a la Jeff Gannon makes me shudder--- I think Amanda's come through on her promise and we're all square. Meanwhile, to see some great goods on display, just read her posts. Lots of different kinds of fun going on. I'm kind of partial to her advice to the lovelorn. She handles the heartbreak and confusion of lonelyhearts and wounded lovers with delicacy, tact, and sympathy, as you can see in this post defending "the fine institution of divorce" and this one, in which she counsels young nerds in lust.

Gay marriage is icky! Gay prostitution? We're cool with that.

Perhaps if JimJeff GuckertGannon the gay prostitute---and I'm talking about his work as a "journalist" not his web-based escort servicing---goes through with his threat to sue John Aravosis, Newsweek, and whoever else he can lay a subpoena on and photographs of him cavorting with various White House staff members and the classified government documents they left on his nightstand afterwards become court documents, perhaps then, the Washington Insiders will stop pretending the story is only about Liberal Bloggers' obsession with one poor young man's private life.

And back in the day, all anybody was concerned with was the woman who sucked Dick Morris' toes while he read her classified documents as if they were love poems.

JimJeff himself is a comic bit player. He is isn't an issue. Who's paying him and how much access he had are.

As Aravosis reports, while news outlets around the country are beginning to grasp the implications of the story, the insiders are either ignoring it or desperately trying to shoo it out the door. This willfull obtuseness (Gilliard handles this one), coupled with the fact that JimJeff pretended to be a journalist for two whole years and did it with the same comical ineptitude as the guy in the Lottery ad who bought the team and made himself a starter plays the infield and yet no one in the White House press room complained makes me think that what's really being wished away here is a gigantic social and professional disaster for the press corps itself.

If the story explodes a lot of parties are going to be ruined and a lot of people are going to have a very hard time explaining things to their wives, girlfriends, and bosses.

Others have noted how the Right has become almost a cartoon of closeted gay self-loathing. From the unbelievabe obviousness of certain bloggers' self-administered nicknames stolen from gay personals ads to the neo-cons obsession with dominance and force to Ken Mehlman's bizarre refusal to say if he's straight or lie about it if he's not to the relentless gay bashing---the signs are all there that some people need to come to terms with who they are fast.

Call me cynical but I'm a Catholic and I have no problem believing that a big, conservative, outwardly homophobic insitution is repressing desperately.

Slowly now. The story isn't important to Liberal bloggers because JimJeff's gay. JimJeff's being gay is what the media and the wingnuts and the White House are fixated on because it scares them.

But anybody who wants to argue the case as if it has no psychological subtext for themselves, has to deal with Lindsay Beyerstein, who in two very thoughtful posts, here and here, explains what's important here. And, yes, sex is part of it.

The moon is made of cheese and only a terrorist sympathizer would say it isn't

Michael Berube has been having a bit of a back and forth with David Horowitz. (Start here and work your way around Michael's page.) Berube says that by linking a bunch of Liberal intellectuals, writers, artists, and activists with a lot of Islamic radicals and terrorists on his web site Horowitz is implicitly accusing liberals of being in league with terrorists. To which Horowitz has replied with several versions of "You're crazy and you're hurting my feelings."

Their debate is yet another example of how impossible it has become to argue with Right Wingers.

Right Winger: I don't understand why you don't agree with me!

Liberal: I just gave you 15 reasons why.

Right Winger: You have no facts to back you up.

Liberal: I just listed 22 facts.

Right Winger: Why won't you debate the issue with me man to man?

Liberal: I am trying to debate it with you.

Right Winger: Just like you, as soon as you're challenged you get hysterical. Typical.

Liberal: I'm not hysterical. You said the moon is made out of green cheese. I said it's not and showed you some of the rocks the astronauts brought back and---

Phil at Here Be Monsters found he didn't have much to say about Hunter S. Thompson's death last week. He was more inspired to write by the passing of televangelist the Rev Gene Scott whom Phil calls "God's Angry Wookie."

Late one night, channel-surfing, I came across a strange and disturbing sight: a hairy, angry-looking man glowering straight at me, silently, seethingly. I stared at him and he stared back. This went on for the longest time. Thank God I wasn't stoned, that's all I can say. (If I had been, I suspect that I would have imagined hearing him say my name, and I doubt that my heart could have taken it.) Later, after some research (including a viewing of the Werner herzog documentary on Scott, God's Angry Man) had filled me in on Scott's modus operandi, I understood what had been going on. Scott, who would sit there at his on-camera desk talking for hours and hours on end, would sometimes decide that the "donations" being phoned in by viewers were insufficient and hold an impromptu strike, refusing to entertain us further until somebody called up and put something in the kitty. Anyway, after our staring contest had gone on for I shudder to think how long, an off-screen voice called out that such and such a sum had been reached, and Scott chose to celebrate by demanding that another off-screen techie, or maybe the same one, how am I to know, crank up the hi-fi and play a record that was then Number One on Rev. Scott's personal hit parade, "Kill Some Pissants for Jesus." Pleased with how it had gone over the first time, he then ordered that it be played again.

There's more. Read and enjoy.

Every time I think I'm out, they keep pulling me back in!

We end where we started this morning. With young women taking off their tops.

Like all things in media, the triumph of the amateur started when new technology was put to innovative use by pornographers. I think it may even be fair to trace the whole thing back to the work of one man, Mark Arnold, a paunchy Jew from Brooklyn with a receding hairline and stunted mustache, who, as Ed Powers, revolutionized pornography with his Dirty Debutantes series, and its short-lived precursor, Bus Stop Tales.

Jason's making a point about the triumph of the semi-professional. It's probably a good one but I got distracted trying to remember which box I put my collection of Dirty Debutantes tapes in when we moved. I spent the night up in the attic hunting for them.

But what I think is, boy, if we'd had digital cameras and really cheap good video equipment back then....

I didn't need to get to know the cast of Charlie's abortive porno film in order to meet girls who would take their clothes off for a camera. Most of my friends back then were theater and dance majors. They were not shy about their bodies. All of the girls who were ambitious to be professional actresses some day had come to terms with the near certainty that sooner or later they would have to do a nude scene. Many of them, and some of the guys as well, picked up extra cash practicing getting naked in public by posing for drawing and photography classes in the art department.

People taking off their clothes for fun, profit, and the greater glory of art was a regular feature of my college days.

Avedon Carol answered my question about why the wingnuts and dittoheads were all spitting red hot nails over Congressman Maurice Hinchey stating his opinion that Karl Rove had something to do with those Rathergate memos. I didn't understand the fuss. Seemed to me that speculating that Rove had a hand in a political dirty trick was like speculating that Paris Hilton likes to be on TV, Barry Bonds has sampled a few steroids, Bill Clinton was not the most faithful of husbands, that guy at the Toyota dealership wants to sell you a car, your pastor wants to increase the take at the Sunday collection, and one of your teenage daughter's friends will try to sneak a bottle of Stolli into the party she's throwing this weekend. In other words, it's speculating that Rove was just being himself and doing his job.

Why, I wondered, were they all so concerned about Rove's reputation and tender feelings?

Avedon explained it succinctly. Rove is behind their anger as surely as he is behind every thing they think and do. And what he wants to do is not defend himself as a paragon of decency and fair play. He wants to destroy Maurice Hinchey's credibility.

"Rove," she said,"has to poison the messenger: because if he doesn't taint the messenger, he can't taint the message as easily. And he wants to taint the message because it's true."

And the sky is blue, Lance.

The wingers and their minions haven't succeeded in scaring or flustering Hinchey a bit. What's more, they have managed to focus media attention on a breed that had seemed to have died out, a Democrat who is really good in front of a microphone.

Since letting loose with them fightin' words last Saturday in a speech in Ithaca, Maurice Hinchey has canceled a business trip to Europe because of a bit of the flu, has managed to find some time to appear on a number of national TV and radio shows and has quickly become the whipping boy at the white-hot center of the conservative blogosphere.

So does he regret having suggested that ace presidential strategist Karl Rove is behind those phony documents that ultimately felled longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather and several top network execs?

"Hell, no," the Democratic congressman said yesterday from his home in the Ulster County hamlet of Hurley.

"Frankly, I'm happy about it, that it's gotten so much attention."

Long-overdue attention, Hinchey said yesterday, because it's an issue that more people need to be made aware of here in the 22nd Congressional District and across the country.

That issue?

"The manipulation of the American information distribution system – the American media – and how they've been manipulated by the White House over the last few years," he said. "Are the American people going to continue to have faith in the integrity and veracity of the American media, or are they going to ask themselves: 'Am I being manipulated by this administration?' So what it means is, we're talking about the basic elements of our democratic republic."

That's my Congressman!

And his point has to be repeated over and over. It doesn't matter if Rove managed this particular dirty trick. He's managed plenty of others. He'll attempt many more. And he does it for a reason. To control the media. To make sure that the American people don't learn anything that Rove and the Bush Leaguers don't want them to. They want to deny us the ability to take an intelligent and informed role in our own government.

He was more of a con artist than an ordinary crook. He was an embezzler, of sorts, and he did a little drug dealing, marijuana mostly, and he cheated at poker when he played with strangers. He was the dorm bookie and loan shark, although a tender-hearted one who didn't charge a very high interest and was willing to accept payment in kind from clients who couldn't come through with hard cash.

His ambition was to become a pimp.

He was an older guy, returning to college at age 28, and he'd been around. He'd done a hitch in the army and he'd driven a cab in New York City, and both lines of work had given him an affection for prostitutes. As a cabbie, he said, he had a number of hookers who made him their regular ride and they confided in him. So he had a high regard for prostitution, both as a money-making trade and a, to him, romantically raffish way of life. He was always on the look out for girls for his stable, but although he had a knack for attracting and befriending hurt, careless, and woefully screwed up young women, as friends, always only as friends, they all had a habit of giving away what Charlie believed was their ticket to wealth.

Editor's note: I considered titling this post "Kevin Drum goes running with scissors."

Meandering through my favorite blogs and webpages last night I noticed that just about everybody has put up a post congratulating the winners of the Koufax Awards.

This seems to be the gracious and good-hearted thing to do, a generous gesture inspiring comraderly feelings all around that will end in a vast, virtual group hug. I admire it and applaud it and I'm not going to go along, dammit!

I'm mad. Not only did my poor little nominated post not make it past the semi-finals, but nobody I voted for won anything at all. Well, that's not entirely true. David Neiwert won for best series, and that's good, except that he had to share it. But nobody else. Not in the categories I voted for them in anyway. I wanted Neiwert to win Best Expert Blog. Some guy named Juan Cole won. Supposed to be some sort of expert on the Middle East. I don't know. Jonah Goldberg doesn't think that highly of him, I hear.

Digby grabbed the award for Best Writing, Mouse Words won for Best New Blog, MyDD for Best Group Blog, Suburban Guerrilla for Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition (although if you win this category doesn't that prove you don't deserve it? Shouldn't the award go to the blog that gets the fewest votes?), Talk Left and Grits for Breakfast shared the award for Best Single Issue Blog. Kos and Josh Marshall picked up the two big awards. I didn't vote for any of them. If you want to think that because a whole lot of other, smarter, savvier, more talented bloggers voted for them they must be very good blogs and deserve their awards, fine. Go ahead. Don't mind me.

I'm just going to sit here in the corner and sulk and try to ruin the party for everybody else by giving off bad vibes (while secretly hoping that some smart, pretty, big-hearted woman notices my all alone in the bean bag chair and comes over to ask in a soft, sweet voice, "Lance, what's wrong? You seem so down." It's unbelievable how many dates I got with this ploy back in high school. At least two! You'd think that every girl would have had sense enough to avoid a drip like that.) I know that all the people I voted for (including Jeanne D'arc,Lindsay Beyerstein,Michael Berube,James Wolcott, and Brad DeLong) deserved to win, just as much as all the others, and I'll console myself with being right about that.

Next year though I think more people should vote like me. Also next year I think Wampum should start a new category and give an award for Most Lovably Clueless Blogger. This might also be called the Blogger Who For Some Inexplicable Reason Decides to Act Like a Dad in a 1950s Sitcom Who Bumblingly Insults His Wife and Daughters With a Foolishly Chauvinist Observation and then Stands There Looking Befuddled as the Ladies Storm Out of the Room and Set Off to Prove Him Wrong!

Many a righteous women blogger marched forth to teach Drum not to trifle anymore with the Goddess. You can start with Majikthise and work your way outward from there.

(They were backed by squads of cheerleading male bloggers, and, I'm sorry, if there's anything as ridiculous as a middle-aged man cluessly offering himself up to the scorn and derision of cool and intelligent young women, it's sensitive young men puppyishly jumping up and down and yipping about how they get it, they're ok with women being smarter and more talented than they are, and look at my blog roll, aren't I a good little feminist? Guys, it's the girls' fight. They can handle it. Go back to your dusting.

Anyway, this open mouth insert keyboard move on Kevin's part seems so spectacularly blockheaded that several people have wondered if he wasn't being deliberately dim to try to stir up a good argument.

Kevin is one of the most even-handed, even-keeled bloggers typing, and his site is a daily lesson in earnestness and how to be moderate and reasonable and open-minded, and you got to figure that such a decent fellow must yearn sometimes to break free and cut up rough. He's the Frasier Crane of bloggers longing to be Sam Malone. (Spot's taken, Kevin.) Of course, he is still Frasier and his only ideas about how to be a bad boy are a good boy's. "Look at me, I'm running with scissors! I'm going to go out and pet strange dogs even though I don't know where they've been! I'm going to needlessly and pointlessly incite the wrath of every right-thinking woman in the blogosphere!"

In Kevin's defense, when he asked where are all the women bloggers he meant where are all the political women bloggers and by political he probably means blogs that like his focus almost exclusively on politics.

(He also means blogs on the left. There are some women blogging over on the right, but they are like their male colleagues, dittoheads retyping the day's meme that came down to them in the daily memo from the Politburo, and like the men might as well just put up one post with a permalink to Powerline.

Another thing. Kevin asked about A-list women bloggers. Since he and other guys like Kos and Marshall and Atrios do a lot through their choice of linkage to decide who is on the A-list this question is in the Larry Summers realm of insensitivity, knuckleheadness, and disingenuousness. The A-list is an Old Boy's Net. Trish Wilson has a few choice words to say on this subject.)

Blogger after blogger presented Drum with lists of excellent blogs by women, but if you look at their lists you'll see that an awful lot of those blogs aren't political, at least not in the narrowly focused way that Drum and Kos and Atrios and Digby and Yglesias et al are. These women write often and write well about politics, but they write as often, even more often, and as well, and better, about a wide range of other subjects.

This is what makes their blogs so good and so much fun to read.

It's why I read them more often than I've been reading Drum and the Gang lately.

I am an incorrigable sexist, I know that. I gave up trying to change a long time ago. I wanted to be a good feminist male but I kept violating the First Commandment:

Thou shalt not say anything that offends the vanity of your female friends and colleagues, no matter how right you really are.

So you can't go by me. I'm bad and past salvation. But I think if you count you'll find that there are quite a few women bloggers on my blog rolls (I'm not going to count, but you can) and I know there are more I could link to and will link to as I go. I'm still building. But it's also obvious that there is only one woman linked to under my category for political blogs, Good People at Work Saving the Republic. Jeanne D'arc. She's not there as a token, although it might look that way, but I'm not going to add another woman just to make her not look like a token because then that new woman would be a token. So if you give me the names of three women I'll put them in.

Hold on! Hold on! That's 15 names! I asked for three.

Yes, I know, Avedon Carol is one, and she could go and probably should go there, but the reason her blog Sideshow isn't there isn't that she's a woman, it's that Sideshow really is a blog. It's mainly a dilligently assembled link show. Very useful and I recommend it. But when I was putting together my page I deliberately tried to keep the blog rolls short, for aesthetic reasons, believe it or not---I don't like cluttered webpages---and I decided that other pages did the same job she was doing. That's the reason a bunch of fine bloggers, men and women, whose pages I read regularly aren't there. Since my blog rolls have expanded a lot of late, I probably should fix that.

But my blog roll isn't my defense against charges of sexism when it comes to blogs. Not at all. I prefer the old "Some of my best friends are..." dodge.

See, never ever did I think of blogging as a man's game. The thought that it might be dominated by men or that men might be better at it than women never occured to me (anymore than did the vice and the versa). Besides the fact that blogging is, when you get right down to it, just writing and in whatever other ways I'm a sexist I'm a pure egalitarian on the subject of writing, the reason I got into this game is that I was inspired and egged on by my still favorite blogger, my idol and my heroine and my friend, Nancy Nall.

And, yes, the whole point of this post has been to lead up to a link to Nance's page.

Not only is Nance my all time favorite in her own right, she has the best comments section going, bar none. It's the only comments section I've read where not only is the writing consistently as good or better than the blogger's her/his self but the commenters also listen to each other and carry on real and for the most part civil conversations. There's not a lot of the showing off that goes on most other places either.

I think very highly of the commenters here at Mannion Forge and Foundry but what goes on over at Nance's place is unique and special, I think.

(A number of Nance's regular commenters are frequent readers of this site, and let me say I'm not hurt that you don't show me the love you show Nance, really. I understand. Go. Go have fun. Nevermind me.)

Her latest post, on TC Boyle and Alfred Kinsey and the gratitude conservative women owe to the latter for their husbands' knowing their way to a certain part of their anatomies, and this post, on kids and sports and the stupid and self-serving ways adults have ruined kids' sports by turning them even at the youngest levels into basically farm leagues for college athletic programs, are good examples, both of what Nance does and how her readers respond. Although, amusingly enough, this post on Indiana's resistence to switching to Daylight Savings Time has generated even more reaction. Go figure.

And go read.

(Cranky and really tee-ed off update full of spite and wounded male vanity: Susan, the Suburban Guerrilla, does the congratulating without congratulating schtick way better than me. No wonder she won. She does deserve wider recognition. Bitch. It's true there aren't any good women political bloggers out there and they have no sense of humor either!)

Just got my first link from the right side of the virtual aisle. Fellow calling himself ConfederateYankee, which I first took as a play on Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and therefore kind of liked. But thinking it over, I'm wondering if it isn't just a statement of his geographic history, his way of saying he's a Southerner transplated to the North. I hope that's all it is. I'd hate to think it represents his personal feeling that slavery and Secession were good ideas.

However you come by your nom de blog, CY, (Do you mind if I call you Cy as in Young?) thanks for the link, and thanks also for the gentlemanly laconic way you did it. Welcome to Lance Mannion Import Exports Inc. and hello and howdy to anyone crossing the virtual Mason-Dixon line over from his site. I'm glad you're here, because maybe you can answer a question that's been bugging me since yesterday.

Now let me ask you. Why does this have you all so riled up? Do you really think this is a scurrilous affront to Karl Rove's integrity and reputation? What is it you think he's paid to do? The man apprenticed with Lee Atwater, after all, and Atwater made no bones about what he was up to. If Rove wasn't behind this one, and I don't think he was, he's been behind plenty of similar tricks.

(By the way, CY, what Hinchey said is not the least bit slanderous, because you can't slander a public figure by stating an honest opinion. Nor can you libel them, which is lucky for all you guys. This how you can get away with stating your honest opinion that Hinchey is crazy without having to worry that his lawyers will come knocking on your doors. At worst what Hinchey said was an insult, and I'm pretty sure Rove's had meaner things said about him and his feelings weren't too hurt by this one.)

I'd also be interested to know why you think Hinchey's opinion that Rove might have done something that would have made his mentor proud is such a weird, bizarre, from-way-out-in-outer space conspiracy theory that Hinchey should be wearing a tin foil hat. I mean, isn't your side's take on the memos that they were forged by people in the Kerry campaign? That's a conspiracy theory if ever I heard one. You don't have any proof of that and not only that you can't identify anybody in Kerry's campaign with the same history of dirty tricks and general ratfucking as Rove has. Rove is the guy who once bugged his own office so he could blame it on his candidate's opponent. So why is your conspiracy theory less crazy than Hinchey's?

I'm just asking.

Anyway, it's good to have y'all here. Feel free to poke around. You'll probably be disappointed to discover this isn't really a political blog and there isn't something in every post to make your blood boil. But keep plugging. You'll find something that'll drive you berserk.

By the way, regular readers, CY's got a pretty thorough list of links to media coverage of this story. Worth checking out.

(Thursday morning update: Looks as though I got linked to by the one wingnut blogger who doesn't have an army of trolls to command forth. Hardly any traffic coming over from CY's place. It's like being threatened by Sauruman after the fall of Isengard and discovering he can't even get Grima Wormtongue interested in the fight.

But!

I've been linked to by the Daou Report. Much, much, much better. And by my local newspaper, The Times Herald-Record. Welcome to all of you coming over from both places. First thing you might want to know is that this post is a follow up to this one and then this one. Second thing is that this is not primarily a political blog. I post on a variety of topics and I hope you'll stick around and do some exploring. Best place to start is with the posts listed over to your right under Re-runs. Also browsing through any of the categories will give you a good idea of what's going on here.

Thanks to you all for stopping by. Come back anytime. Light's always on. Clerk's always on duty. Night owls and tour buses welcome.)

As I was saying yesterday, my congressman, Maurice Hinchey, committed a combination of blasphemy and treason over the weekend. He suggested that Karl Rove might actually have played some dirty pool.

Gasp! Not Karl Rove!

The wingnut bloggers, led by LGF, immediately got out their pitchforks and torches and began to march on the castle.

I called Hinchey's DC office and two of his local offices yesterday to offer some moral support.

"Hi, I'm my real name and I voted for the Congressman and I'm glad he said what he said about Karl Rove and please tell him for me that I think he's doing a great job!" Something like that.

At all three offices the women who answered the phones were way too grateful for that kind of call.

They'd been fielding calls from LGM types all day who you can imagine were less than polite. I expect the LGM types were thrilled that they were talking to women too and inspired. Nothing gets the blood flowing like the chance to bully the kind of woman with whom a conversation under normal circumstances would include her saying, "Not if you were the last man on earth." Which, in their case, is probably all women. If you can't date them, scream yourself hoarse at them.

The aides knew that the calls were part of an organized effort and they knew not to take them seriously. But it sounded to me like they weren't prepared for the relentlessness or the anger or the language and they all sounded frazzled.

"It's days like this," one of them said, laughing ruefully, "That I wish the Congressman could spend some time sitting in my chair."

Like I said, I don't read the wingnut blogs. But I got a taste of them yesterday through a Technorati search. Type in Hinchey Rove and you get page after page of wingnuttery, all of it saying exactly the same thing. I mean exactly. I know we can get repetitive here on the left, but we don't retype each other's posts, word for word, over and over, as if they were copybook exercises or samplers we were stitching.

And is their only rhetorical tool calling the people they disagree with "moonbat crazy?"

At any rate, they were all promising each other that Hinchey was about to get caught in a blogstorm.

Repent ye sinners! Offend the blogs and the Lord will bring down upon you a plague of misspelled and ungrammatical ranting and ye will be called that which you fearest most, "moonbat crazy," and moonbat crazy you shall be called, and yet worse must ye endureth, for over and over again must you hear the worst of calumnies; wearers of a tinfoil hat shall you be called and on your head shall you be told to place such hats made out of tinfoil, and a storm of blogs will descend upon you and you shall cry out for His mercy but your cries will not be heard, for lo you have found disfavor in the eyes of the Lord and have offendeth his People, and ye are indeed moonbat crazy, and wearers of tinfoil hats shall you be and by your tinfoil hats will you be known, thus saith the Lord!

Hinchey's staff had to endureth the blogstorm anyway. It's like walking down a city street on a very dry summer day and having the wind kick up. A lot of dust and grit gets in your eyes and mouth. It's annoying and depressing but you just keep on going where you're going and when you get there you take a big drink of water, comb your hair, and forget about it.

Judy Woodruff interviewed Maurice Hinchey on CNN yesterday afternoon. Since Hinchey's a Democrat, a liberal Democrat at that, Woodruff felt free to actually do her job as a journalist. She asked him real questions and he had real answers. Digby's got the transcript up on his site.

Here's my favorite part though. It comes from Hinchey's answer to a question in which Woodruff implied that he was talking through his hat and that without hard evidence Hinchey had no business speculating that Karl Rove would do the kind of voodoo that he do so well. Hinchey said:

Well, Judy, no one has come to any conclusions and that's the unfortunate thing. We need to get to the bottom of this. We need to get to the bottom of the whole business of manipulating the media that has gone on in the context of this administration.

I think that that's critically important. The essence of this democracy is really at stake. If people sitting back in their living rooms can't rely upon the information they're getting over the news channel or over the radio, then very important aspects of this Democratic system become eroded.

So, we need to get to the bottom of it, that's the point here. I'm quite surprised, frankly, that this has gotten all the attention that it has, but in a way I'm grateful that it has because it's important for us to be concerned about these things. Manipulating the media in this kind of a cynical way is antithetical to what we stand for as a nation, we need to find out who did it.

I'm sure after this the wingnuts are only going to try to intensify their little blogstorm. Hinchey himself will be fine. His staff will have another hard day.

If you live in Hinchey's district, the 22nd here in New York, you should call one of his offices and cheer them on. Quietly, politely, and briefly---briefly is good, because their ears will be raw. Here's the link to the contact numbers.

Me, I'd like to send them all flowers.

If you're not one of his constituents and your representative is a Democrat or one of the vanishing decent Republicans, call and ask your rep to back Hinchey up.

(Update: Yesterday I wrote that I don't happen to think Rove had a hand in the Rathergate memos. But it would be like him and I'm open to the possibility. TBogg seems to think he did and sees Rathergate as part of larger scheme that is, he hopes, on the edge of collapsing. Thanks to Roy who wrote to tell me about the TBogg's post.)

Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey was speaking about Social Security before a roomful of constituents in Ithaca, NY the other night and in the course of the discussion, one thing leading to another, he happened to mention that he believes that Karl Rove had a hand in bringing down Dan Rather.

Hinchey was talking about the ways the White House attempts, usually successfully, to cow and browbeat and manipulate and deceive the media.

"Probably the most flagrant example of that is the way they set up Dan Rather," [he said.]

"Now, I mean, I have my own beliefs about how that happened: It originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House ... . Once they did that, then it undermined everything else about Bush's draft dodging. … That had the effect of taking the whole issue away."

From any reasonable person's point of view, this is hardly hot stuff. Those damn memos had to come from somewhere, and it's weird to me that we still don't know where. Why not Karl Rove? He has a long history of playing dirty. I happen to think that the likelier explanation is that some well-meaning person who'd seen the originals made copies from memory and that the story is just another lesson in journalistic hubris. But who knows? Maybe the memos were part of some elaborate scheme and scheming is what Rove gets paid to do.

But Hinchey's audience wasn't made up of all reasonable people. Hinchey noticed a man in the audience with a tape recorder he didn't think was a reporter. Turns out he was right. The guy was from little green footballs. The local paper calls him an "operative" for LGF and I'll bet he loves that. Probably makes him go all Jack Bauer from 24-ish tingly all over.

The operative uploaded what he'd recorded to LGF and the results were what you'd expect. Remember in The Two Towers when the Uruk-hai captain chops off the head of the orc who wants to eat Merry and Pippin and then announces, "Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!" and all the orcs tear into the corpse of their former comrade?

Something like that but not as pretty.

The orcs and goblins at LGF smell fresh meat and they want to eat Maurice Hinchey. At least his legs.

"This guy needs a clue-by-blog and wake up to being a mature person," wrote mglazer. "The old days of sitting in a little town hall and pandering to your constituents with LIES is no longer OK, acceptable or ignored – we can ALL HEAR what you say now."

Nevermind the routine wingnut blogger hubris here, which is just their basic paranoia turned around---All the world used to be out to get me, but now they know I'm out to get them back!---what I like there is the sight of a blogger lecturing a United States Congressman on what it means to be mature. I think we can all imagine at least 47 different types of personality mglazer might be, starting with the most mature of them, a high school computer geek still fuming over that cheerleader ignoring his political rant in the line at the cafeteria, and none of them will come close to resembling an actual, functioning grown-up.

But I'm probably selling the guy short. I'm sure his job at Games-Workshop has taught him more about life and being mature than six terms in the US House of Representatives has taught Hinchey.

An LGF-er who calls himself christheprofessor, who I suspect is more likely nick-named after his favorite character on Gilligan's Island than after his actual job title typed, "I say Republicans in the House of Representative should demand an investigation of his, er, evidence, and then have him censured."

Congressman Hinchey, prepare to feel our wrath!

I don't know what they expect Tom DeLay to do though. The GOP leadership can't even get all the troops in line on Social Security. I don't know how the LGF-ers think he can slap down Hinchey for stating an opinion that a lot of Republicans probably share. Hinchey's not worried. He holds a pretty safe seat. His district includes Ithaca, and we all know what's high above Cayuga's waters there, Poughkeepsie, another university town, the city of Kingston, the town of Woodstock, and, well, me.

All the rest is Catskill Mountains and deer.

So most of Hinchey's constituents are likely to think that if anything he was being too circumspect in his suggestions about the nefariousness of Karl Rove and his boss.

But here's my question? What are the LGF-ers mad at?

I thought this was the kind of thing they like about Rove. I thought they loved the dirty tricks, anything to win, when the going gets tough the tough lie, cheat, steal, and make fun of faggots approach to campaigning and governing. I thought they high five each other all the time about what a good job their guys do ratfucking Democrats. It helps them feel like manly men. Ayn Randian men. Gods on earth who can do whatever they want and get away with it because THEY HAVE THE POWER!

I don't read any of the winger blogs, not even Reynolds or Drudge or the Corner. I leave that to other, tougher liberal bloggers. Bloggers with stronger stomachs and steelier nerves, bloggers like Edroso. If I was going to start I wouldn't start with LGF any more than I would start exploring Paris via its sewers. So the root cause of their indignation will stay a mystery to me, unless those of you who are braver and more combat-hardened than I am come back from the front lines with a report.

And if what Hinchey said makes them all Yosemite Sam hopping up and down mad, they must be on the point of exploding at CBS' Dotty Lynch floating the idea that Rove had a hand in credentialing one time web porn master and go-go boy and now aspiring journalist Jim/Jeff Guckert/Gannon.

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed–the word is passed to the professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught–never so much as suspected. This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.

“But the professor was fenced round with safeguards so cunningly devised that, do what I would, it seemed impossible to get evidence which would convict in a court of law. You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill..."

Meanwhile, back in reality:

Hinchey said he has no plans to stop making allegations against Rove and the Bush administration. "What we are seeing is very new and very dangerous," Hinchey said. "No administration has attempted to manipulate the facts and information and to manipulate the news media to distort the facts ... as what we are seeing in this administration."

(Hinchey'll stand up to these guys just fine, but I feel sorry for his staff who are probably spending a lot of time taking all kinds of LGF shit. If you want to give them some moral support, contact any of Hinchey's offices and tell them you care.)

It's no surprise that a lot of bloggers have taken the death of Hunter S. Thompson pretty hard, particularly those of us in our 30s and 40s. Man practically taught a whole generation of aspiring journalists how to write. Of course it was how to write in a way no respectable newspaper or magazine would pay anybody but him to write. But along came the internets and Blogger and Typepad and MT and suddenly thousands of inner Gonzos were uncaged and loosed upon the land.

As people come to terms with his suicide, there will be more and more on the web about Thompson. I came across three good new posts today.

Neddy Jingo wipes a manly tear from his eye and buckles down to the keyboard to retell a great Thompson the maniac anecdote. Incidentally, Neddy comes clean about the recreational drug use in his past much more forthrightly than a certain resident of a certain house of a pale color in a certain nation's capital city ever has.

James Lileks, he of no clue and no shame and no trouble finding a parking space at his local mall and that's why it's so much more life-affirming to live in his suburb, says that Thompson's death filled him with pity. He always felt a bit sorry for Thompson anyway, he says. Roy Edroso points out that Lileks feeling sorry for Thompson is only a little less ridiculous than a barnyard duck feeling sorry for a race horse who has come up lame.

And Tom at FunctionalAmbivalent makes a claim that he's pretty confident no one else can make:

Back when I had a brain tumor, Hunter Thompson visited me in my hospital room and autographed my Bible.

For the record, I make no claims of having been influenced by Thompson myself. Although I admired his stuff, everything I know about writing I learned from Franklin W. Dixon, reading the backs of cereal boxes, and paying strict attention to Sister Mary Antonia when she waved her yardstick at me.

I think Roger Ebert needs to add to his Glossary something called the "Luke! Nooo! Factor," named after the inability of characters in Star Wars movies to think of anything useful to say in times of danger so they just shout each other's names and cry out "Nooooo!" Movies with very high "Luke! Nooooo!" factors can be assumed to be full of long, loud, and incoherently edited action sequences in which not just the characters but the screenwriter and the director have completely lost track of what's going on. The characters are just shouting monosyllabically to remind the audience that somewhere in the midst of all the flying bullets, exploding scenery, fireballs, and unconvincing cgi the hero and heroine are still alive.

"C'mon!" and "Run!" and sometimes "Go!" are occasional additions to the noise.

The boys have the day off from school but the 11 year old is stuck inside with a bad cold. He's huddled up under a dozen blankets on the couch in the family room watching a movie I don't even want to know the title of. In the last 15 minutes the only dialogue I've heard has been some guy yelling "Anna!" about once every other minute and some girl, probably Anna, yelling back, "Nooooooo!" All the rest is explosions and roaring monsters and people screaming.

Hunter S. Thompson's dead. Shot himself. Don't know if there was a rhyme or reason to it yet. I suspect that all that anger and disgust he'd been projecting out into the world finally found the shark it had been hunting for all the time. Story in today's paper about his suicide describes him as "an acute observer of decadance and depravity in American Life."

Well, yeah, he observed it. Doesn't mean it was really there to observe. I don't mean that all the drugs and booze had him seeing spiders and bats where there were no spiders and bats, although they did. I mean he wrote fiction and knew he was writing fiction. All of his characters were imaginary, he just named them after real people, including the one he called Dr Hunter S. Thompson.

"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist," he said. "You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."

Or:

Whatever degradation and depravity he actually observed, he augmented, instigated, and avidly participated in, and in a way he was a performance artist and his books were chronicles of his performances.

Or:

He wrote an extremely introspective and solipsistic form of existential memoir, like Kierkegaard, but like John Bunyan he allegorized his self-examinations, symbolizing his demons in the form of human beings that he named Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, the Hell's Angels, and Raoul Duke.

An early stage in Thompson's savage journey into the heart of the American dream was passed near here. His first civilian job as a journalist---before that he was a sports editor for an Air Force newspaper; he finished up as a sports writer too---was at the newspaper where the blonde works. Thompson worked there before the blonde was born. He wrote his novel The Rum Diary while living in an unheated cabin in the woods. He didn't wear shoes in the news room. He worked at the paper for two years.

One day he beat up a vending machine.

This is from a letter he wrote to a friend:

Several weeks ago I outraged a long-time Record advertiser by sending a meal back to his kitchen for immediate consignment to the garbage can. This consequently resulted in a rather ugly session between me, the advertiser, and the Record's editor and publisher. The judgment was definitely not in my favor and I was told that my job would henceforth rest on very thin ice.

Several days ago I was instrumental in the looting of an office candy machine. I had put two nickels in the thing without getting anything out of it. I then gave it a severe rattling which rendered the coin slot obsolete. Word got around in the backroom – notably the managing editor. I was fired the next day.

Ad comes on at the end of Law and Order CI tonight. Or maybe it was on at the end of whatever show was on WB just before I switched to Law and Order. I can't remember because the ad was quite powerful and knocked all thought out of my head.

A car, some luxury sedan, sitting in what looks to me like a very large and luxurious bathroom without fixtures, surrounded by candles. A beautiful woman in a long white robe approaches the car. Before she reaches the door she shrugs her robe from her exquisite shoulders and lets it slide slowly down her naked back. The camera closes on her face so that we don't see the robe fall to the floor. The woman, obviously nude, climbs into the car. She lounges for a moment in the driver's seat. Then her hand begins to carress the flesh colored leather interior. A languid, blissful expression comes over the woman's face, she closes her eyes...

Tell me what I think is happening here isn't happening.

At the end of the ad it's revealed that we've been seeing the woman's dream. What she's really been up to all along is lying in her bathtub, surrounded by candles, and doing what I think she was doing in the car but fantasizing she was in the car.

But fantasizing about what?

Was she fantasizing about doing it in the car?

Or was she fantasizing about the car? Was the thought of the car so arousing she couldn't contain herself?

Or are we supposed to believe that her desire to own this car is so powerful that it is taking over her dreams, and the car is appearing surreally in dreams about other, non-automotive things? Are we to think that at other times when she is not lying in a bathtub masturbating and is having non-erotic daydreams the car appears too? If she daydreams about mountain climbing does she find the car at the summit? If she dreams while she is sleeping, having, say, one of those typical dreams where she's back in college and has to take an exam in a class she forgot she'd registered for and never attended, does the car appear as the professor or a fellow student? Is this supposed to be what happened with her auto-erotic interlude in the bath? One minute she's fantasizing about Brad Pitt---or Jennifer Aniston. I don't know which way she swings after all. But one minute she's imagining herself with another human being and suddenly the human being turns into the car?

But at the end of the ad she doesn't look surprised or bemused or amused or chagrined or anything you would expect someone who just caught herself having an orgasm at the thought of possessing a new car would look. She looks...satisified.

Is this a regular fantasy of hers then? Is she a weird fetishist or do lots of women wish that instead of having to play with themselves in their bathtub they could just go out to the garage and hop in their luxury model sedan?

And just who is this ad supposed to be appealing to?

Is it aimed at guys? Do ad execs believe guys are so dumb we'll think, Wow, if I bought that car it will get my wife/girlfriend so hot she'll strip naked and go at it right in the front seat! We are that dumb but the ad is too tasteful, too soft focus, too much like the cover of a book of erotica for women. And the woman in the ad isn't a swimsuit model type. She's beautiful but in the way an actual human being is beautiful. She is beautiful in a wholesome, Dove soap way women are expected to identify with in other kinds of ads.

So is the ad aimed at women?

I don't believe the ad execs who came up with this ad were thinking, Women will be so turned on by the thought of masturbating in our car they'll run right out and buy one. And I don't think the equation of one pleasure with the other is something they could reasonably expect many people would recognize immediately. "Oh, driving that car would be just as much fun as last night when I was dreaming of Jennifer Aniston. (Or Brad Pitt. Or both.)"

Maybe the whole point was just to produce a riveting ad that will make people sit still and stare at their TVs instead of rushing out to the kitchen to grab a snack.

It worked. Except for one minor detail.

I can't for the life of me remember the make of the car being advertised.

Maud Newton's blog drives me a little crazy. I stop by almost every day, and almost every day I don't give it more than a quick skim because it seems to be the same dilligently collected mix of links to news from the world of publishing, tidbits of gossip from the worlds of publishing, writing, and blogging, snippets and links to articles, stories, bloggings, or book reviews that I have either already read or can't imagine why I or anybody in their right mind would want to read, plus---and this is the worst offense of all---absolutely no mention of Lance Mannion.

And people think she's sooooooo cool.

But the reason I keep going back is that Maud surrounds all this with her own wit and insights and, from time to time, adds to it a link to an extended piece of her own writing from her archives.

Whenever this happens I am thrilled but also a puzzled. How in the world, I think to myself, did I manage to miss this little gem on its first go round? Or, if my meds aren't working, I'll think, How does that sneaky little floozy know exactly which day I'm going to skip reading her blog and why does she hate me so much that she only posts these little gems when she knows I won't be around to read them?

I don't know how I missed it the first time, or remember what degree of paranoia I felt when I stumbled across the link Monday, but here is one of Maud's archived gems in which she explains why she is not such a big fan of Valentine's Day.

Treason is like soooo gross

You probably heard. Jimmy Carter has been branded a traitor. (See Matt Yglesias.) The US Navy routinely names its submarines after traitors, you know. The wingnut blogger who called him one has sort of taken it back, grudgingly, and some of his fellow wingnut bloggers have disavowed any knowledge of his actions, but it's horseshit. (Yglesias again, and The Poor Man's "Of course they aren't sorry.") The Right has been at this now for 60 years. As far as they've been concerned everybody on the Left has hated America since the end of World War II. They think this because they have declared themselves America so everybody who opposes them in any way opposes America.

They've called Carter a traitor before and they'll do it again. Which is why although I'm appalled and would like to say something stirring in Carter's defense or at least link to the many others who have said what I would have liked to, I'm linking to this post by Norbizness, who takes another tack.

You'll also see where I came across the Harry Potter Quiz.

Great post, Roy, but you forgot to tell us how to pronounce Joe Btfsplk

When I was a kid and just beginning to discover the wonder of reading the comics on my own, Al Capp was coming to the end of his tether. I was a faithful reader of Li'l Abner but pretty much all of the jokes went over my head and I probably appreciated Capp's artwork more than his humor. I was an aspiring comic strip artist myself back then. I think I remember enjoying the adventures of Fearless Fosdick more than the goings on in Dogpatch, although I'm sure that as I approached adolescence what I liked best about the strip was Daisy Mae and Moon Beam McSwine.

(A commenter over at Roy's place notes that at one time the great SF illustrator Frank Frazetta worked for Capp and ghosted a lot of the art work on the Sunday strips. That would explain a whole lot.)

Then when I was a teenager my parents bought a summer house on Lake George. The woman they bought it from was a hoarder and she didn't take a lot of her hoarded goods with her when she moved out. There was a store room off the garage that was filled with stacks of old magazines and newspapers. One day I was sent in there to clean them out, so of course what I did was sit down to read through them. One of the stacks of papers was from the 1960s and I remember reading through the comics sections and coming across a Li'l Abner strip that featured an unidentified caricature of Bobby Kennedy. I was shocked by it.

Capp had drawn Bobby with obvious malice. The figure was dwarfishly small and all hair and buck teeth. I don't know how I even recognized it as RFK. In my Irish Catholic Liberal Democratic household Bobby was even more of a saint than his brother. It amazed me that Capp didn't also like and admire him. I don't think I was still naive enough to think that everybody thought that what my parents thought was good and right was good and right. My grandmother loved Nixon, so I knew that even the best and wisest people could be wrong about politics. But there was something about discovering that Al Capp and I weren't on the same side that surprised me. By the time I'd started reading the strip Capp must have lost a lot of his edge. It seems to me that there were an awful lot of stories about Lower Slobbovia and Shmoos and Lonesome Polecat and Hairless Joe and their adventures in the Kickapoo Joy Juice trade and Fearless Fosdick, and whatever politics Capp put in them must have been pretty watered down and easy to overlook in all the lazy farce. Maybe I was just dumb. However it came about, though, I think up until that moment I must have thought that because I liked and admired Al Capp's work I liked and admired his thinking.

Roy Edroso liked and admired Capp's work too, and still does, but he isn't at all impressed with Capp's thinking on the subject of politics. Edroso makes it clear that as "a political philsopher, Capp was a moron." But Roy has a surprising sympathy for what made Capp tick and an ungrudging respect for the way Capp expressed his cantankerous conservativism in his art and in his life. Especially compared with the "whiney woe-is-me-I'm being-persecuted crap" that is the daily bread and butter of a lot of contemporary conservatives. Roy is thinking particularly of David Horowitz and his ilk.

Lennon would have been proud

Neddy Jingo is still on the trail of the Confederate raider John Mobberly, but he returns from the 19th Century to the 21st only to take a fond look back at the 20th, specifically at one decade. Guess which one. Ned loved Paul McCartney's Super Bowl show because he saw the spirit of Sergeant Pepper come alive and dance around on stage with Sir Paul. Ned makes the case that the cute one really was being cute. Think about it. Drive My Car? Get Back? If it was just the sad and TV safe oldies but goodies show a lot of people complained it was then why not She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand?

Lucy in the Sky would have been too obvious. Plus, it was John's.

The Amazins

Neddy also reveals he is, or was, a Mets fan and thus joins my growing line-up of Very Smart Bloggers Who Made Very Dumb Choices When Picking Their Favorite Baseball Team Back When They Were Kids. (In defense of my 10 year old self, the Yankees stunk back then. The Mets had Tom Seaver.) So far, in addition to Ned and myself, we've got Watson,Wolcott,Gilliard,Edroso,Howard Altman,Jack Shannon, and Eric Alterman.

Any other Met fans out there? I'm thinking we've got to do something about this. Like a softball game against a team of Yankee fan bloggers in Central Park. Got to be more fun than all those panel discussions on "Wither Blogging" I never get invited to. (The answer, by the way, is hither. Hither blogging.) So, whadya say? Who's up for it? Losers buy the beer!

On second thought, some of us are getting a little old and creaky. If that team of Yankee bloggers is made up of all twenty-somethings we're in big trouble.

Maybe we should just get a section together at Shea.

And the growing season will be so much longer!

You ever notice that the conservative line on Global Warming is that the scientists don't know what they're talking about, they're a bunch of idiots, but if by some wild fluke they're right, then those same scientists are smart enough to fix it?

Kip Manley has two fine posts, in the first of which he remembers how when he was 11 a Time magazine cover alerted him to the fact of homosexuality and in the second he reminisces about how, when he was not very much older, a cheesy best-selling potboiler by Lawrence Sanders showed him the essential humanity of homosexuality, although in the weird, corrupt, vaguely tragic but also tawdry way all human behavior is portrayed in best selling potboilers, and how that set Kip on the path towards the realization that came to him his senior year in high school that the urges and feelings of gay men were no different and no less intrinsic to who they are than the urges and feelings he had about girls.

Obviously the quiz was written by a 13 year old girl with a crush on the actor who plays Ron.

I was a bit surprised when I turned out to be Ron, because I had answered every question consciously trying to skew the quiz so the result would be Harry. I planned to go back and see if I could make it come out Draco Malfoy on the next round.

But it makes sense. Of course answering every question the way you think Harry would answer them would result in your being Ron. That's how Ron himself would take the quiz, trying to think like Harry.

Coincidentally, when I was 14 I looked like the kid who plays Ron did in the last movie, except for the red hair---tall, skinny, gawky, arms and legs all out of proportion and out of control. I had the same croaky voice too and the same need for a good barber.

So I look like Ron and think like Ron trying to think like Harry. What else?

Well, as we know, Ron will wind up with Hermione.

And I did.

Bossy overachieving know it all goody goody with a quick temper and a strong right hook?

Remember that scene in Prisoner of Azkaban where Hermione jumps in front of Ron and socks Malfoy in the snoot?

I don't know what you felt then, but I felt a definite shock of recognition.

Back in high school, before she met me and ruined her life, the blonde dated a guy so tall and rangy that her father nicknamed him "Suburban Sprawl." He was a big strong kid too and went on to be a farmer. No kidding. So he could take care of himself in a fight, if he had to. He was a good natured, easy going character, so the need didn't come up often. Except once. Thanks to the blonde and her friends.

Senior year, she and her gang were down at the Jersey Shore and one night on the boardwalk at Ocean City they were out having a good time when some punks started hassling them. Punks, picking on a group of girls. If they took the quiz they'd come out Crabbe or Goyle. They didn't know the girls weren't without male protection. Suburban Sprawl was just off a ways, buying cotton candy or something. But he saw what was going on and strode over, all Gary Cooper at his best, to stand up to the punks.

No doubt he could have dusted the floor with any one of them, but he was outnumbered. But the minute he confronted them and fists were clenched and jaws began to jut and it looked like Suburban Sprawl might actually have to teach the punks their manners, the blonde jumped between them swinging her fists and screaming at the punks that they'd better not dare hurt her boyfriend if they valued their lives!

Sometimes when the blonde re-tells this story, the punks back away in fear. Sometimes, they stand there flabbergasted, not knowing what to make of this crazy woman.

Always, though, it ends with Suburban Sprawl picking her up by the waist and carrying her out of there kicking and screaming and swinging her fists.

I'll leave it to people who know what they're doing to figure out if it's true, that Google has played around with the knobs and dials on the weird and wonderful machines in its top secret basement laboratories, fixing it, accidentally on purpose, so that blogs have dropped way down the lists generated by Googlers Google searching via Google. (That ought to get me some attention from the Google spiders!)

Mithras, at Fables of Reconstruction, sounds the alarm, foreseeing very bad days ahead for blogs. Jayson Knight, though, isn't so sure anything dark and sinister has occured. Jayson doesn't trust Google as far as he can spit, and he's a poor spitter, lacking in both accuracy and distance. (Actually, as far as I know Jayson could knock a fly off a moving car at fifty yards with a loogie, but I never pass up an opportunity to steal a joke from P.G. Wodehouse.) He thinks that probably all that's happened is that Google has just completed its mid-monthly housekeeping and the shake-ups in page rankings are a result of innocent and routine alogorithm maintenance, or something like that. He has some other ideas too, and doesn't rule out evil and villainy on the part of Google's grand wizards. But he's inclined to go with his housekeeping theory.

Me? All I know is what I read on the internets. (And thanks to Majikthise for the links up there.) It does seem to me that in the last couple days my own Google traffic has gone up. Way up. And I've followed some of the links back to the original searches and my posts appear fairly high in the listings, some of them much higher than they have any right to be.

For instance, my post Threesomes appears on the second page of a search for threesomes, and you'd think with all the porn sites, chat rooms, and personal ads pages I have to compete with it'd come in a lot farther down. I imagine the overly-hopeful guys---and girls---doing that search are dreadfully disappointed when they land here.

And you would think Elmore Leonard fans who did a search for Be Cool and Get Shorty would turn up an awful lot of used bookstores and mystery fan sites before they came across my post on what makes good mystery writing. Nope. I'm number 2 on the first page, with 251, 998 more results bringing up the rear. Likewise, searches with variations of Lemony Snicket and Book the Twelfth turn up this post on the first page, right up there with Amazon and Barnes and Noble and ahead of Snicket's own site.

So Google is still letting me have the perv traffic and the 12 year old bookworm traffic.

But even more esoteric searches are bringing in the crowds. And this makes me think Jayson is right. Google's last mid-monthly adjustments would have happened before Wolcott linked to me and so this new fix reflects the increase in my traffic since.

Google's January re-jigger also occured before I'd included the words Scarlett Johansson and naked in the same post. You wouldn't be surprise to find out how many and what kind of searches turn up that post. (Since I just did it again, I figured I'd better put that picture over there so that Scarlett's fan club has something to look at and doesn't go away too mad.) Zooey Deschanel has her fans too who want to see her in the buff.

So does Topher Grace.

But most of the Googlings bringing folks into the Big Top here at the Mannion Family Circus are innocuous and indiosyncratic and yet of enough common interest that there must be thousands of sites containing some information on the topics, and still I'm turning up pretty high in the lists. So if you go by me this Google news is just scuttlebutt.

I was talking about this with the blonde over coffee this morning and the 9 year old overheard. When I mentioned that some of the most popular bloggers, like Atrios, had noticed unsettling signs and portents in their Google rankings, but that I had noticed the opposite effect here, he said, "Then it must not be true, because you're one of the Top 10 Bloggers."

He also thinks I'm one of the Top Ten Smartest and Strongest Dads. Please don't tell him. He'll figure out the truth soon enough. I did think I could risk telling him the facts about my place in the blog world without disillusioning him too much.

I said it was true that the page has picked up a lot of new readers lately, thanks to the generosity of some truly popular bloggers. But I had a long way to go before I cracked the Top 100 let alone the Top 10. "Probably I won't get there, Jack, because I'm not shrill enough," I said.

"You're not?" the blonde asked incredulously. She doesn't read a lot of blogs. She's used to my rants around the house. I told her she doesn't know from shrill.

(Mac Tomason has listed me among the Royal Order of the Shrill, but it's really an honorary club membership, like those ones you get from BJ's Wholesalers in the mail, and I am not worthy to sit at the same table as Atrios, Digby,DeLong,Gilliard, and the other Great Knights Who are Shrill.)

I explained to the 9 year old that the really popular blogs are the ones devoted to politics or to one specific subject.

I didn't mention that most of the most popular blogs are part of the Right Wing Noise Machine. There are some things he is still too young and innocent to comprehend.

"Daddy's blog is more of a general interest one," the blonde explained helpfully.

The 9 year old got it at once.

"I see! You're like Cartoon Network!"

"How so?" I asked sharply, trying but failing not to sound defensive.

"Cartoon Network doesn't have just its own kind of shows," he said, "It's got shows from all over, from Kids WB, FoxBox, and itself! It isn't just about one thing."

Put that way, I guess he's right. This is like Cartoon Network. I have the Cartoon Network of Blogs.

And now having typed Cartoon Network four times---five!---I expect my Google traffic will shoot up!

Put a drink in his hand and stand him up in front of a crowd full of stuffed shirts guaranteed to be offended by almost anything he says, and Rumpole will raise his glass and propose, "To crime!"

"Will you please charge your glasses, ladies and gentlemen," he will say, with assumed reverence, "and drink to absent friends, the criminals of England.

"Without these invaluable citizens there would be no lawyers, no judges, no policemen, no writers of detective stories and absolutely nothing to put in The News of the World."

In other words, if there was no crime lawyers, cops, and newspaper and television reporters would be out of work.

Like I said yesterday, self-interest gives journalists a rooting interest in crime and other stories about blood, death, and human misery.

Geraldo's had to turn his car around again. The Feds have decided those two friends of the guy who shot up Best Buy weren't mass murderers in training but just a couple of mopes who like to see things go boom. They used their pipe bombs to blow the shit out of abandoned cars and were content with that. They still have to face some weapons charges but they've been released pending trial or a hearing. They just have to wear monitors. So the story turns out to be what it appeared to be Monday morning, a young man, probably mentally ill, possibly also retarded, acting on some delusion or pushed by some demon or demons unknown, walked into a mall and randomly fired off a rifle, and fortunately no one was killed.

You probably won't read about that in your paper or see it on Fox News. The story has turned out to have no death, very little bloodshed, no sentimental possibilities. It's just another sad story about another routinely miserable life.

The media types who rushed to cover the original story as if it was a terrorist attack before they could possibly know that it was or wasn't a terrorist attack won't bother to try to undo what they've done. Or won't try hard. They're finished with it. And they're happier with their non-story than with the true one. It's a lot more fun to imagine a spectacle of blood and death than to bother about what really happened.

Besides, it might have been terrorists or another Klebold and Harris, right?

And someday it will be a story like that, right?

So we got to be prepared.

Right?

When I say journalists root for spectacles of blood and death I'm hyperbolizing, but only a bit, and I'm not accusing them of being heartless or inhuman. I think this is very human of them. People long to do the things they are good at doing. Heart surgeons root for the chance to do by-passes, firefighters root for fires, cops root for crime, and soldiers root for war. They do it vaguely, admitting to themselves only that they're hoping to have an exciting or interesting day at work, and most of them have other, nobler and more compassionate feelings that guide them. Most of them.

Journalists don't go into the office every morning thinking, Boy, I sure hope there's a triple homicide waiting for me or a nice juicy sex scandal in the mayor's office that leads to fisticuffs, gunplay, jailtime, and divorce court. They think, I hope there's an interesting and exciting story for me to cover today.

But by interesting and exciting they mean stories that will sell papers and TV ads, and the stories that sell the most of both are stories that feature blood, death, scandal, and sentimentality.

Since they're always on the lookout for such stories, always chomping at the bit to chase after them, it's not surprising that from time to time they jump the gun, as they did about the mall shooting here.

By they I mean Fox News and other overzealous national media organizatons. The local paper handled it just fine.

Smart and honest journalists understand this about themselves. Smart, honest, decent-minded, and professional journalists keep a sharp eye on themselves because of it.

Those qualities seem to be in shorter and shorter supply among journalists, particualarly the ones working in television.

But it's the sentimental stories I think cause the most trouble.

Spectacles of blood and death are what they are. You cannot film them when they aren't happening, although you can pretend they haven't happened if you can't get to them to film them. (Cf Rwanda) Occasionally the media will rush to cover a story and find the story's not there, as happened with the mall shooting here Sunday. But it's very hard to invent such stories.

Sentimental stories are another matter. Sentiment is subjective and fluid. You can feel it when there's nothing really going on to cause you to feel sentimental. And you can inject it into anything.

More than they enjoy spectacles of blood and death people want happy endings and like a good cry. A story of blood and death with a happy ending that makes people cry is the dream story.

So, in the spirit of giving the people what they want, the media routinely finds happy endings to stories that in reality are so awful there can't possibly be a happy ending.

This is what happened to the media coverage of the tsunami. The story's focus quickly shifted from the death and destruction to little morality tales of heroic survivors, rescued children, and reunited familes. After that, when all the hugging and crying for joy that could be filmed had been filmed, television was done with the story.

The media loved the Iraqi election because it allowed them to wallow in sentiment and even give the impression that the war had come to a happy ending. Nobody covering the war believed that the election would or could solve anything, certainly it didn't stop the bloodshed, and quite probably rather than singaling the birth of democracy it's, as Juan Cole reports, the first step in the rise to power of a pro-Iranian theocracy. (Matt Yglesias and Rob Farley both think that in context that adjective, pro-Iranian, isn't as scary as it sounds. Maybe not, but the noun, theocracy, is every bit as depressing as it sounds, especially in context. Ezra Klein explains how the context has to be seen in context.) But at least for that day the TV screens could be filled with smiling Iraqis waving purple fingers and everybody could get choked up blubbering on nobly about the democratic spirit and the bravery of the Iraqi people and the sacrifices of the dead soldiers and Marines who had brought this wonderful moment about.

On television all deaths are uplifting.

Most journalists are deeply cynical people. Like cops and social workers, they've seen too much of the worst of human behavior. So what you've got is a whole bunch of cynics, without any sentimental bones in their bodies, trying desperately to uncover the sentiment in every story. Since they wouldn't know a true emotion if it bit them, it's no wonder they see it where it isn't and often wind up forcing phony sentiment into stories that either have a real sentimental side of their own, which is then drowned in corn and schmaltz, or into stories that aren't about feelings and shouldn't be reported that way.

And because they see things that aren't there, they routinely report things that didn't happen.

The President had introduced two women he was exploiting for their symbolic usefulness, an Iraqi dissident, who'd been tortured by Saddam and who'd voted in the election and waved her purple finger dutifully for Bush, and a mother who'd lost her Marine son in the war and who was clutching her dead child's dogtags. The two women hugged. That really happened. Stevens saw that. But then:

After the two women clung tearfully to each other for a moment, Mrs. Norwood bent to disentangle her son's dogtags, which she had been clutching throughout the speech, and which had gotten caught on a button on the Iraqi woman's cuff. On both Fox and MSNBC immediately following the speech, the talking heads initially misinterpreted this gesture, saying that Mrs. Norwood had given her son's dogtags to the Iraqi woman. Chris Matthews' first follow-up comment as Bush left the podium: 'I don't think any words the president spoke could match the moment when he looked up and watched Janet Norwood give the dogtags of her dead son to that Iraqi woman tonight.' At the time, this struck me as odd; would a grieving mother really give such a significant object away to a complete stranger, especially after she had, essentially, already given the life of her own son? What would it even mean to hand over her son's dogtags, and who in their right mind would accept such a gift? Re-watching the encounter, I was relieved to see that, post-hug, Mrs. Norwood was still firmly clutching the tags in her hand.

(Thanks to Phil at Here Be Monsters for alerting me to the story. Phil has a few choice words to say about the exploitation of grieving mothers by politicians, right and left, and the media, right and left.)

Once the media get wedded to the sentimental side of a story, that's all they like to report on. It's almost impossible for them to let go even when they know that the sentiment is bogus and there's another, truer story to report.

Which is why they still look for ways to cover the war as if we were winning. And why they tie themselves in knots trying to portray George Bush as a heroic war president and not the man whose inept administration failed to prevent 9/11 when it had all the information and warning they needed to do it and not the man who froze on that day, who was so flummoxed by events that he had to fly around in his airplane for hours while his advisors tried to figure out what he should do and who let Osama get away and who decided to fight the wrong war in the wrong way and who seems determined to start yet another war and who on almost every issue that he tackles is either clueless or lying. Bad presidents give you no chance to be sentimental. There's no manly choking up to be done, no unabashed weeping for joy. It's better if Bush is Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Warren G. Harding inspired only tears of laughter.

It's how the tsunami story turned into a feel good story about the triumph of the human spirit.

It's why when, someday, some nut or maniac who knows how to use a rifle walks into a mall the last images you will see on your TV screen will be of joyful parents reuniting with their children who were safely hiding out at the Gap and not of body bags being loaded onto ambulances.

Over the weekend, an almost certainly mentally ill, and possibly also retarded, young man loaded a rifle, drove to a mall near here, found his way to Best Buy, and started shooting.

Fortunately, he pretty much missed everything he shot at. He did wound one man in the leg. And another man got hurt by flying debris and bullet fragments. Nobody knows yet how much mayhem and bloodshed he meant to cause. There have been reports that he was obsessed with Columbine, but he did not follow the example of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris when it came to arming himself and planning his attack. He walked into the mall with just the one rifle and 60 rounds of ammunition and he used that up quickly. He may have been thinking about doing something like this for a long time, but he doesn't seem to have had any clear plan and heading out to the mall Sunday may have been a decision of the moment.

(The Times-Herald Record is the best source for the story. You might have to register. They're kind of capricious about that, requiring registration for some stories and not for others. But registration is free.)

It's probably only due to bad aim and an unreliable weapon that he didn't kill anybody. Things might have been a lot bloodier if he'd been able to shoot straight. But it's not clear yet how much blood he wanted shed or if it mattered to him if he killed anybody at all. He dropped his gun on his own accord, before the cops were anywhere in sight, and he didn't put up any fight when three very brave guys who worked at Dick's Sporting Goods came along to subdue him. He even put his hands up for them. One of the men remembers him saying, "Relax, guys, it's over."

The Ulster County District Attorney doesn't think he meant to kill anybody, despite his fascination with Columbine. The DA doesn't even think that Columbine had anything to do with what happened Sunday.

But that didn't stop Fox News. You probably know all about this story already, even if you live in Kalamazoo, or Katmandu. A lone nut in a small city in Upstate New York walks into a very average type of shopping mall with a rifle, shoots out a few windows and TVs but doesn't kill anybody or even wound anyone seriously and it was a national story. It got such big play all over that my in-laws down near Philadelphia heard about it before we did. My mother in law called us up to tell us that from what she was hearing the mall was under siege by several gunmen and bodies were piling up like cordwood.

Fox News was most egregiously out of control, reporting on the story "live" when all they had on the scene was some woman they didn't know who claimed to be at the mall where she'd locked herself in a storeroom at the Gap to hide from the gunmen.

The woman was obviously frightened, but seemed more than willing to claim her 15 minutes of fame.

She said shots were fired from several locations around the mall. She said she heard there were multiple gunmen. She said her boyfriend was a cop and he told her to stay locked inside the store.

She also said something very telling: She didn't actually see any of this happen. She heard the shots and ran for safety, just like the hundreds of mall patrons who were fleeing for their lives.

You got to wonder how she had the presence of mind to call Fox and where in heaven's name did she get their number. Does she have it on speed dial?

Joe's column expresses a real working journalist's disgust with the frauds and mountebanks who run and front for TV "news."

The Fox producer was on the phone to the newsroom Sunday.

She tells me Geraldo is on his way up to Kingston.

She acts as if I should be impressed by this.

She wants to know if our reporter, Paul Brooks, who was at the mall when the shooting broke out, can appear on Geraldo's show live.

When I finish laughing, I tell her that Paul is too busy for prime time.

Unlike Geraldo, Brooks is actually working this story.

Dowd doesn't get into but he implies what he thinks was driving FoxNews' and the others' overblown and overwrought and way under-sourced coverage.

Terrorism.

Fox and the rest weren't covering the story that was unfolding. They weren't out to cover it. They were out to cover the story they assumed was happening.

For over three years now we've been scaring ourselves with all kinds of scenarios about the next terrorist attack. It's pretty much taken for granted that malls are prime targets. This makes sense. Malls are our marketplaces and over in the Middle East marketplaces have been among the terrorists' favorite killing grounds.

But if you're going to jump to the conclusion that gunshots at a shopping mall signal a terrorist attack because terrorists like to kill people in marketplaces and malls are marketplaces, you ought to pause, just for a minute, to consider the way gunshots at a mall are very much not like a terrorist attack in a marketplace. Those terrorists don't use guns. They use bombs.

Guns are unreliable. They don't kill people fast enough and they don't leave behind enough wreckage, blood, and body parts. Terrorists don't just want to cause death. They want to create a spectacle of death.

This makes malls actually unsuitable to their purposes. A suicide bomb inside a mall would certainly kill and maim a lot of people, but the killing and maiming wouldn't necessarily make it on the news, because malls are enclosed and they can be sealed off. The cops would keep the TV cameras outside.

Gunshots not bomb blasts. No TV images. You hear that and it should cause you think twice about whether or not it's terrorists. Plus, there are too many other things it might more likely be.

Like a lone nut who has finally gone off the rails and his meds.

A disgruntled former employee.

A broken-hearted lover. We actually had one of those at another mall near here last year. Some nitwit shot and killed a kid in the parking lot. The nitwit thought the kid was making time with his girlfriend. There was an actual death in that one but it didn't make the national news because nobody got on her cell phone to Fox.

The possibility that it wasn't gunfire at all and everybody was running from firecrackers or exploding light bulbs or a TV on too loud was also higher than terrorist attack.

All those possibilities should have caused the producers, editors, and reporters at Fox and the other places to proceed cautiously.

And I'll bet they were all assuming the "terrorists" were Muslims, even though most domestic terrorism is homegrown. Eric Rudolph is a terrorist. Timothy McVeigh was. Many of the Patriot and probably all the white supremicist groups (as if there's much of a difference) are full of would-be terrorists. The media have been unwilling to cover them as what they are, reluctant to even acknowledge they exist---David Neiwert has been beating his head against this wall for a very long time---but they're real, they have killed a lot of people, they have tried to kill many more, and that should cause news organizations to think twice whenever they think the word "terrorist" about an act of violence inside the U.S. and to slow down long enough to at least find out what color skin the alledged terrorists have.

But Fox et al rushed to cover the story they assumed was unfolding, and they assumed it was the kind of story they wanted it to be. I'm not saying they were all hoping, consciously, that terrorists had attacked. I'm saying that the media by nature cannot help themselves. They are driven to cover the stories they want to cover and the stories they want to cover are the ones that sell a lot of papers and even more television ads.

And the stories that sell the most of both are stories that feature sentiment or spectacle. Naturally, then, the media's favorite stories are the ones that provide both, which is why they love grieving relatitves at crime scenes, fires, and outside courtrooms.

The media, like terrorists, though obviously for very different reasons and to a very different degree of culpability, love spectacles of blood and death. Always have. Smart and honest journalists know this about their profession and themselves. Smart, honest, and decent-minded journalists, like Joe Dowd and his colleagues at the Times-Herald Record, hold themselves in check because of it.

But there seem to be fewer and fewer of the latter at work these days, especially in television.

Fox, of course, has another reason for having hoped that what happened Sunday was a terrorist attack. Fear of terrorism has become the main support beam underneath the rickety fortress of the Bush Administration. But I'll bet that never entered the heads of the reporters and producers on the job Sunday afternoon. They set out to cover the story they wanted it to be, another spectacle of sentiment and blood and death.

And failing a terrorist attack they would have been happy if our poor local nut job had been able to pull off another Columbine.

And if they couldn't have either, why then, what the heck, they'd just cover the story as if it was the story they'd been counting on.

Explains what Geraldo's doing checking out the local police blotter.

Really wild update: The shooter might not have been another Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris himself, but it appears he has friends who are or who, allegedly, were more determinedly heading down that path. Two of his buddies were picked up by the Feds today who tracked them down through videotapes found at the shooter's home. The videos show them setting off homemade pipebombs. They were making the bombs and stockpiling weapons and the cops think they may even have planned to use them at a local high school. Who knows what was going on Sunday, then? He may have been trying to prove something to his friends. He may have gotten impatient with all their big talk. He may have been moved by his own separate demons. Or he may have found a way to rat out his pals without consciously turning snitch.

Whatever it was, I'm sure Geraldo is on his way back up here.

(Note: Don't bother following the continue reading link here. This post is done. It's just I can't convince the bot at Typepad of that.)

The particular picture on which Sam Weller's eyes were fixed, as he said this, was a highly-coloured representation of a couple of human hearts skewered together with an arrow, cooking before a cheerful fire, while a male and female cannibal in modern attire, the gentleman being clad in a blue coat and white trousers, and the lady in a deep red pelisse with a parasol of the same, were approaching the meal with hungry eyes, up a serpentine gravel path leading thereunto. A decidedly indelicate young gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else, was depicted as superintending the cooking; a representation of the spire of the church in Langham Place, London, appeared in the distance; and the whole formed a 'valentine,' of which, as a written inscription in the window testified, there was a large assortment within, which the shopkeeper pledged himself to dispose of, to his countrymen generally, at the reduced rate of one-and-sixpence each.

'I should ha' forgot it; I should certainly ha' forgot it!' said Sam; so saying, he at once stepped into the stationer's shop, and requested to be served with a sheet of the best gilt-edged letter- paper, and a hard-nibbed pen which could be warranted not to splutter. These articles having been promptly supplied, he walked on direct towards Leadenhall Market at a good round pace, very different from his recent lingering one. Looking round him, he there beheld a signboard on which the painter's art had delineated something remotely resembling a cerulean elephant with an aquiline nose in lieu of trunk. Rightly conjecturing that this was the Blue Boar himself, he stepped into the house, and inquired concerning his parent.

'He won't be here this three-quarters of an hour or more,' said the young lady who superintended the domestic arrangements of the Blue Boar.

The brandy-and-water luke, and the inkstand, having been carried into the little parlour, and the young lady having carefully flattened down the coals to prevent their blazing, and carried away the poker to preclude the possibility of the fire being stirred, without the full privity and concurrence of the Blue Boar being first had and obtained, Sam Weller sat himself down in a box near the stove, and pulled out the sheet of gilt-edged letter-paper, and the hard-nibbed pen. Then looking carefully at the pen to see that there were no hairs in it, and dusting down the table, so that there might be no crumbs of bread under the paper, Sam tucked up the cuffs of his coat, squared his elbows, and composed himself to write.

To ladies and gentlemen who are not in the habit of devoting themselves practically to the science of penmanship, writing a letter is no very easy task; it being always considered necessary in such cases for the writer to recline his head on his left arm, so as to place his eyes as nearly as possible on a level with the paper, and, while glancing sideways at the letters he is constructing, to form with his tongue imaginary characters to correspond. These motions, although unquestionably of the greatest assistance to original composition, retard in some degree the progress of the writer; and Sam had unconsciously been a full hour and a half writing words in small text, smearing out wrong letters with his little finger, and putting in new ones which required going over very often to render them visible through the old blots, when he was roused by the opening of the door and the entrance of his parent.

'Vell, Sammy,' said the father.

'Vell, my Prooshan Blue,' responded the son, laying down his pen. 'What's the last bulletin about mother-in-law?'

'Mrs. Veller passed a very good night, but is uncommon perwerse, and unpleasant this mornin'. Signed upon oath, Tony Veller, Esquire. That's the last vun as was issued, Sammy,' replied Mr. Weller, untying his shawl.

When are card shops going to figure out that most people don't buy their Valentines cards until Valentine's Day? Ok, most men. Oh, all right. Most husbands. Still, there are a lot of us and we deserve to have our procrastination and forgetfulness respected!

I was in a Hallmark store this morning and was dismayed to see how empty the racks were.

For the record, I was buying a card for the boys to give Nana Mannion. I bought the blonde's early this year. Way early. Last year, in fact. Last Valentine's Day, I covered myself for this year by buying two cards. And I'm pretty sure I remember where I hid the second card.

I was ahead of the game on the candy and the jewelry too. But you have to buy the flowers on the day. So I did.

Me: I'd like to buy four roses, please.

Frazzled female clerk at the florist's: Four?

Me: Four. (I didn't think I needed to explain that there are four people in the Mannion household.)

Frazzled clerk: Do you want those wrapped together or separately?

Me (turning on the old Hawkeye Pierce-esque-ish charm): I don't know if I envy or feel sorry for the guy who has to buy four separate roses today.

Frazzled clerk: Huh?

Me: Um.

Frazzled clerk: Oh. Right. I'm sorry. I'm a little slow on the uptake today. Besides, you'd be surprised how often that happens, guys come in with more than one valentine to buy for. Happens a lot.

Me: I'm sure. Been awhile since I had that problem though.

Frazzled clerk: That'll be seventeen sixty five, please.

I really did have that problem, a couple of times. I never had to buy four Valentines. But there were some Valentine's Days when I had to buy two and there was another year when I could have bought three but I decided that might be risking it. As David Letterman once said, that's the kind of behavior that leads to fisticuffs and gun play. So I decided not to buy flowers or even give a card to one of the girls I was dating.

Of course she turned out to be the one I ended up having a real romance with.

No, that was not the blonde. That was a brunette. After I met the blonde there were no more Valentine's Days that required me to buy in bulk.

It's hard to describe the pure joy of a Mets fan back in the early 1980s the first time he saw Darryl Strawberry park one. The Straw's home runs were things of beauty. The ball flying off his bat seemed to travel a bit slower than other power hitters' homers, as if the ball was pleased with itself, like a dancer from the line who'd been given her own solo and she was determined to draw it out so you could savor the moment of loveliness and grace. His dingers would have been wonderful whatever uniform he'd been wearing, but to see him do it in the orange and blue was especially exhilerating. Strawberry was the first Mets player in the team's history who scared the beejeeburs out of opposing pitchers. He was frightening for nearly 10 years, but by the end Mets fans weren't anywheres near as thrilled with him. I always thought it was unfair of manager Davy Johnson to expect Darryl to carry the team after Gary Carter's and Keith Hernandez's powers faded. The Straw was never really made to stir the drink. But he had other problems and the wreck his career became was of his own making. Tom Watson chronicles Strawberry's sad story and reports on the new chance he's been given for a modest redemption by the Mets.

Trippingly on the tongue

Our Girl in Chicago likes the adverb I invented the other day. "Almodovarianally" I'm pleased she does, but frankly I think it looks funnier than it sounds, because it can't be sounded. It's impossible to say out loud. I like the word she invented much better.

Almodovarianesqueishly.

Not only can you say that one, it's fun to say. Go ahead, try it.

Almodovarianesqueishly.

It's that queish sound near the end that does it.

Now I'd like to see what she can do with Scorcese.

I am the father of two Charlotte Simmonses

Believe it or not, and many of you won't---miserable cynics!---George Bush has been reading a book. Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. All Presidential reading lists are suspect. Whenever we're told what the President happens to have checked out of the library at the moment, we're being handed a political message. This was true of Bill Clinton's wonkishly self-assigned homework, Jimmy Carter's love of Dylan Thomas' poetry, and Eisenhower's bedtime fondness for Zane Gray westerns. Right wing intellectuals have embraced Wolfe's bad imitation of Judith Krantz and the announcement that Bush has been dipping into it is a message to them. But I like to think that the President really is reading it. My question is, though, does he know it's a novel?

I like imagining the mix of emotions overtaking him as he follows his finger along Wolfe's pages. First, a wince of self-recognition as he acknowledges the resemblance between Wolfe's arrogant male protagonist and his own young self. Then a pleasant nostalgia as he sees his college days played out in all the drinking, skirt-chasing, and blowing off of homework Wolfe melodramatizes. Unlike Wolfe, Bush knows first hand that booze and sex weren't introduced onto campus in the 1990s by liberal academics preaching moral relativism. Young George Bush didn't need any lectures on Derrida to find his way to a keg. His life might have taken a happier turn if he had, because he never listened to his professors. And finally the dawning horror as the misbehavior of Wolfe's female characters begins to seem all too recently familiar to him.

"Laura! Laura! Tell me the truth. Our girls never cut up this way, did they? I mean, I know there was some kind of dust up in the media when Jenna had a beer or two somewhere, but she and Barbara never acted like this, did they? This is the way daughters of Liberal presidents behave! Amy Carter! Chelsea Clinton! I can see them fooling around like this, but not our girls!"

"Of course not, dear."

"Thank God."

"Honey, when you finish Mr Wolfe's book, would you like to try something by Dostoevsky? He's one of my favorites, you know."

"He is?"

"Oh yes."

"I didn't know that."

"It was in all the newspapers."

"Sonuvagun. I have to start reading those things again. Does the ink still get all over your hands or have they fixed that?"

So I'm glad to see that a Harvard professor has observed up close what I've only caught glimpses of while standing in line at Starbucks and eavesdropping on the conversations of the college student baristas.

For almost 20 years, starting in the 1980s, Harvey Cox taught a course on the "moral example and teachings of Jesus." The class was wildly popular. Cox has written a book about the experience, When Jesus Came to Harvard, and you can read a review of it here.

Four years ago this weekend I went for a walk with a little kid who was about to turn five.

Tomorrow the temperature’s supposed to get up to 56, but today we’re having snow. Heavy, wet snow that fell fast. Several inches. Jack and I walked up to the drugstore. Jack, who’d been playing outside, which for him means working outside, explained as we headed up the street that he hadn’t been able to find his little snow shovel, so "I use-ed one of the big shovels." He pronounces a lot of his past tense verbs in Shakespearean fashion.

Snow on one of the big pines near the corner had bent a big branch until it touched the ground. A Sears delivery van turned down the street. Jack recognized the lettering. "Hey, that says Seaw-wez!" Corporate graphic design as an aid to learning to read.

We weren’t far along before all that trudging tuckered him out and he asked for a lift. He rode piggy-back for a ways then demanded to be put down. "Put me down please." I let him slide down my back. "Oh my God!" he exclaimed. "I fell a long way, did you know that? I didn’t know the snow was so hard."

Lump of snow dropped off the drugstore’s roof just ahead of us. The plop startled a clerk getting off work who was brushing off her car and she looked up at the roof with an apprehensive gaze as if expecting an avalanche to follow.

On our way back, the black dog who lives at the corner chased us along the inside of his fence and scared up a crow half way up the street with his barking.

Jack helped bring in the garbage cans. Ran down to the garage towing his and making heavy-duty work noises, "Ha ho ha ho ha ho," declaring at the end, "That begins with a H!"

We shoveled the driveway together. Some snow dropped down his back. "Ow ow ow ow," he complained. Then he pointed out, "I said ow and not brrr."

Now he's nine. He had a fun day. Thanks to all who left birthday wishes.